With the increasing importance of archiving data for safety, security and compliance objectives, managing information has become high priority. Those in regulated industries, not only have to keep the stack of data, they must also be able to locate and retrieve information quickly. This places unnecessary strain on the storage environment, which can negatively impact infrastructure performance and the delivery of mission-critical applications. Henceforth, data archiving is more likely to gain significance. At this juncture, Comguard Infosol Pvt. Ltd, headquartered in Maharashtra, comes into the picture to help enterprises monitor their information bank. The company plays the role of a value added distributor of GFI Archiver, an archiving tool offered by GFI Software, a multi-national IT security solutions provider.

Comguard Infosol is a part of Spectrum Group of Companies, established in 2002 at Dubai Internet City and emerged in India in 2009. Leveraging on in-house technical support resources and strong channel support, Comguard has been recognized for its dedicated and sustained efforts to add value to innovative solutions. Through GFI Archiver, the company enables organizations to effectively manage files, email and calendar histories. The product’s award winning functionality simplifies accessing and backup processes, simultaneously reducing the risk of data loss as well as compliance breaches due to failure to retain key information. “GFI Archiver 2015 eliminates the need for employees to rely on cloud-based services for document storage, providing IT administrators with completely transparent oversight of the email and archive habits of their users as well as giving visibility into the potential risks their day-to-day activity may create”, states Harish Rai, Country Manager, Comguard Infosol.

Control over Archiving

GFI Archiver supports popular hosted productivity suites like Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps. A few pointers that parts GFI Archiver from others of the similar stream is that it not only keeps tab on emails but also other formats such as files, calendar items and meeting requests. Likewise, its File Archiving Assistant (FAA) feature which enables customer to share files between users and store them centrally without relying on online storage providers. FAA is a Windows application that runs in the system tray on the desktop. Every user can create folders with files that they want to archive. Files saved or modified in these folders are automatically collected by the File Archive Assistant and saved in GFI Archiver. As it runs on a common platform, information can be accessed and updates can be learned from any system. Retention policies eliminate old data according to a time frame set by the user and could be revived whenever needed. With on-premise storage and maintenance costs growing, GFI Archiver’s intelligent file history retention enables administrators to establish rules and gain better control over the archiving of files, especially those with multiple versions, allowing for more effective management of costly storage space.

Another captivating feature of GFI Archiver is its MailInsights reports which help in identifying potential security breaches. Business intelligence and other valuable insights gleaned from email with GFI Archiver help managers evaluate job performance, boost productivity, and encourage efficient communications practices. For lengthy emails, MailInsights report lists all emails that are larger than a specified size so that admin can easily identify users sending out large emails or files, possibly in abuse of the email infrastructure. The employees’ actions could be a major cause of the need for increasing storage capacity. The report also identifies the file category so that the admin can categorize those files that are purely for ‘business’.

Walking the talk

GFI Archiver has worked efficiently for many international clients and Environment Canterbury, a regional council of the New Zealand government, is one of them. As per New Zealand’s Public Records Act 2005, it was essential that the council used an email archiving solution to ensure the integrity of communications, both current and historical. By using GFI Archiver, Environment Canterbury migrated from physical servers to a virtual environment, without any other external support. In addition to enhanced management capability and easier ability to achieve compliance, compatibility with other systems and hardware were easily acquired. The council was also able to upgrade GFI MailArchiver several times without any hindrance.

The product has proved itself as a robust tool for getting a grip on the information flow. Rather than being just a solution, GFI Archiver has enabled organizations to upgrade and empower their internal infrastructure by surpassing various check points like storage space, time and security. Considering its potential to enable secure email storage and email compliance, the product is bound to expand its reach to newer markets.